The gallery is cloaked in darkness until Shary Boyle finds a light; once the room is illuminated I realize we are not alone. At the far end stands a woman, entangled in spider webs.

“I wove the web out of string, just like a spider,” Boyle explains. “You can go up to her and touch her.”

I inch toward the sculpture, which is called White Light. Her eyes are piercing, and her mouth is slightly ajar; she looks human, but reptilian, too, with elongated, claw-like feet and fingers. She strikes a pose both sexual and violent. The audience won’t be privy to the same level of detail; the sculpture is to be viewed under black light; with the lights off, one can only see the string, her body delineated by the web. “It’s too bad we don’t have the UV, because it’s a pretty great effect.”

Boyle summons me to the other end of the room, motioning towards the wall.

“I got them to build this in here,” she says, smiling. “A peephole.”

It’s a clever conceit; curious gallery-goers standing on the other side of the wall will be able to glimpse the world of Shary Boyle, a world of grotesqueries and wonders, magic and supernatural beings. Flesh and Blood, which opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Sept. 15, collects approximately 30 of the Toronto artist’s recent works, including paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations.

On a recent weekday afternoon, Boyle was in the AGO’s first-floor European galleries, overseeing the installation of the exhibition. Most of the delicate porcelain sculptures were still boxed-up, and the walls were bare. Sitting in one of the four galleries devoted to Flesh and Blood, Boyle discussed the evolution of her career.

“I really have branched out into areas where I’m totally uncertain, which is very exciting for me,” says Boyle. “I kind of like not knowing what I’m doing.”

The Scarborough-born artist is “by far the youngest” of five children; her three brothers followed their father into the family business, glass and screen door repair, while her sister works as a landscape designer. “I’m kind of a bit of an outsider in my family,” she says. Boyle, 38, was drawn to art from an early age. “I remember winning the poster competition in kindergarten,” she says. “I remember kids crying ’cause I could draw better then them.” She attended Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts and OCAD ( “I was a little bit marginal; my work was never embraced”), from which she graduated in 1994.

Since then, she’s become a breakout star in Canada’s art world. She moves effortlessly between mediums; her work has appeared in comic book anthology Kramers Egot, The Believer, and Francis Ford Coppola’s literary journal, Zoetrope. She’s collaborated with several musicians, including Peaches, Feist, Jens Lekman and Will Oldham. She’s twice been a finalist for the Sobey Art Award (2007

and 2009) and last year she won the $25,000 Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Louise Dery, Galerie de l’UQAM’s director, who has long wished to mount an exhibition of Boyle’s work; after she won the Iskowitz, Dery approached AGO about co-hosting Flesh and Blood, a title inspired by Fauna, a new novel written by Boyle’s friend Alissa York: “I often get inspired by writing. A phrase or passage or line turns into a painting or drawing.”

“The work is about the vulnerability of the body,” says Michelle Jacques, the AGO’s associate curator, contemporary art, who has known Boyle since the late ’90s. “It’s about sexuality, it’s about relationships, so it’s about flesh and blood in that literal way. And then there are also references within the work to family and ancestry, and that kind of thing, [so] it also refers to that idea of flesh and blood being about genealogy. And then there’s often something just a little bit dark and macabre about some of her work, so the idea of flesh and blood works on that level, too. It’s a very layered title.”

Boyle’s work is just as layered; Flesh and Blood is a cross-section of porcelain sculptures, a series called The Highland Paintings, inspired by a trip to Scotland, and four major installations. Approximately 90% of the work has not been shown before.

“We didn’t have a real thematic strategy … because my work, it really is a bit of a universe, and there’s so many materials and so many mediums that it’s hard to cut right through,” she says. “I just hope that it has a sense of familiarity and intimacy and a revealing of just the frailty of the body, but at the same time it kind of launches new ideas and perspectives on what it means to be human.”

Dery, the exhibition’s lead curator, rifles off about a dozen descriptors when speaking about the work on display: “It’s about cloning….It’s about fairy tales, imagination, invention. And it’s also about some environmental [issues], the future, how we live together, how we can share the same space, the same life, the same food.

After a three-month stint at the AGO, Flesh and Blood will travel to the Galerie de l’UQAM and the Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery next year. And though Dery would like to see it tour internationally, it is not scheduled at the present time. Even though she’s travelled, lived and performed around the world, her (growing) acclaim in Canada doesn’t seem to transcend borders, something Boyle wonders openly about: “I do feel a little ghettoized in Canada. I have a hard time getting out of Canada, or even Toronto-specific.” Boyle thinks her lack of an international breakthrough might be “because I’m so insistent on always branding my own path,” refusing to take any of the art world’s established routes for making connections, such as through moving to New York, Berlin, or London, or going to any graduate school.

“It’s tricky to be such an independent person, from Canada,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how incredible your work is — if you’re an unknown person and you’re from Toronto, people’s eyes glaze over immediately as soon as you introduce yourself.”

It’s not that she requires international validation, but “opening an audience outside of your familiars is really key for someone that wants to be stimulated.” As she puts it, “you’re not staying at home to talk to yourself.”

“For me,” explains Boyle, “it really is about a dialogue. Life can be really isolating or terrifying or euphoric — it’s all these things. And while I’m here I want to have an exchange. I want something to vibrate. And I want to be really stimulated. I’m kind of a busy mind, and I love to talk and I like to have conversations.

“Internationally, there’s a lot of different attitudes about art, and I’d like to encounter them. I’d like my work to encounter them. I’d like to put my work in the consciousness of a completely different culture and see how they respond and have that exchange. But I do not want to move to Williamsburg or Berlin to do that.”

Instead, Boyle prefers to stay in Toronto, where she has a house in the Bloor and Dufferin area and a studio in the Junction. Whether or not living in Toronto and opening up a dialogue internationally are mutually exclusive remains to be seen.

“Look how stubborn I’ve been, and I’ve gotten this far,” she says. “I want my cake and I want to eat it, too. I want to live in a quiet place, where I can hear myself think, and have a lot of time to work and not be so expensive that I’m killing myself trying to scrabble … I’d like to do everything on my terms, total Frank Sinatra-style.”

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